PROVIDENCE — An inmate serving life without parole for murder will be allowed to continue filing lawsuits in the state’s Superior Court.The Rhode Island Supreme Court ruled Thursday that an order issued...

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By
Tracy Breton
Posted Jun. 21, 2013 @ 12:01 am

PROVIDENCE — An inmate serving life without parole for murder will be allowed to continue filing lawsuits in the state’s Superior Court.

The Rhode Island Supreme Court ruled Thursday that an order issued by Superior Court Judge Patricia A. Hurst barring Norman Laurence from filing any more lawsuits on his own behalf (as a pro se litigant) was overly broad, failed to recite any findings of fact and impermissibly infringed upon his access to the courts.

Moreover, wrote Justice Maureen McKenna Goldberg, Hurst’s order “does not comport with this court’s precedent” and was improperly entered. “It is tantamount to a lifetime ban on the Superior Court’s acceptance of any pro se filing by plaintiff … and fails to exclude criminal cases or those matters in which plaintiff may appear as a defendant.”

Laurence, who was convicted in 2000 of murdering his former girlfriend, Betty Jo Gardiner of West Warwick, has been a frequent litigator since his imprisonment at the Adult Correctional Institutions, representing himself in lawsuits brought in the Supreme, Superior and U.S. District Courts.

He represented himself at his murder trial after going through five lawyers whom he said would not present the arguments that he wanted. He even fired his standby counsel before pleading his own case to the jury that found him guilty. He appealed his murder and conspiracy convictions on grounds that he was “forced” to represent himself at his trial, which he said violated his constitutional rights.

Laurence and a friend, Jay Young, killed Gardiner in 1997 in a remote area of the Big River Management Area in West Greenwich. The pair beat and kicked her, struck her in the head with a tire iron and then dragged her, semiconscious, into the woods, where Young stepped on her throat, killing her, according to prosecutors. Young pleaded no contest to second-degree murder and conspiracy and was sentenced to serve 40 years of a 60-year sentence.

Both men confessed to the police that they killed Gardiner, 24, because she had tipped off West Warwick police that they were responsible for a break-in and later refused to rescind her statement.

In the case before Hurst, Laurence had sued 53 employees of the Department of Corrections, claiming that they had violated his right to privacy by using a hidden camera in his prison cell to monitor and videotape him as he reviewed his “legal work” and “legal mail”; that the defendants were monitoring his personal activities; that some of the defendants showed the videotapes and that they harassed him.

The state moved to dismiss the lawsuit. Hurst granted the motion on Aug. 22, 2011. That same day, Laurence filed another lawsuit against 13 corrections department employees. He asserted that his free speech was being constrained by “the use of physical violence, threats, blackmail and extortion,” that his rights to the courts were being obstructed and that he was being harassed because of his legal filings.

The state’s lawyer, Thomas A. Palombo, asked Hurst to “fashion a remedy to prevent [Laurence’s] nonstop litigation against the DOC and literally every DOC official and officer.” Laurence, he argued, had filed “numerous meritless” lawsuits in the state and federal courts and was abusing the state’s and the judiciary’s limited resources.

Hurst then issued an order which banned Laurence from filing any more lawsuits in Superior Court, unless represented by a licensed attorney.

The state Supreme Court, in previous decisions, has recognized that courts have “limited resources and that relentless, frivolous filings constitute unreasonable demands on those resources.” Judges may place “reasonable limits on the filings of litigants who abuse the judicial system” but the high court has said, “such a sanction “should be drawn narrowly. … Broad filing restrictions against pro se plaintiffs should be approached with particular caution.”

“In fact,” wrote Goldberg, “this court carefully instructed that across-the-board restrictions to court access should be issued only when abuse is so continuous and widespread as to suggest no reasonable alternative.” Such bans must be supported by specific findings and the party who’s to be subjected to a ban must “be given notice of the contemplated sanction and an opportunity to present evidence in opposition to the proposed sanction.”

But Hurst did not do this in Laurence’s case. “Critically, the order fails to recite any findings of fact, nor does it appear that plaintiff was afforded notice or an adequate opportunity to be heard before it was entered. Furthermore, we are not convinced that the record in this case reflects a degree of abuse that is so continuous and widespread as to suggest no reasonable alternative,” said Goldberg. She noted that in arguing his case before the Supreme Court, Laurence “stated that life at the ACI has improved … and that he does not anticipate any additional litigation.”